Pomp,circumstance, and wild Arabs: The 1912 royal visit to Sudan

This article examines the use of British-imperial symbolism in public life throughout the period of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. The visit of George V to Port Sudan in 1912 proved the catalyst for large-scale imperial display, which was subsequently reworked into the unique annual commemoration of King's Day. Through such overt imperial pageantry, the British-dominated Sudanese government actively promoted its own position within Sudan at the expense of its Egyptian co-rulers, a strategy which illustrates the political tensions along the Nile Valley. Demonstrating the government's dominance over the landscape and people of Sudan to both the metropolitan and Sudanese audiences, these imperial events aimed at consolidating Britain's hold over the country throughout the Condominium. Sudanese political elites soon became active participants in imperial displays, seeing an opportunity to secure their position through demonstrations of loyalty, and using the propagated values of imperialism and monarchy in imaginative and selective ways. Although it was a valuable tool in creating a focal point of Sudanese unity in an otherwise culturally diverse territory, British imperialism was at the same time always a limited instrument, constrained as it was by Egypt's legal claims to the territory.     

Spain and the Partition Treaties (1697–1700)

This study takes an analytical approach to the diplomatic strategy adopted by the Spanish monarchy in confronting the challenge it faced associated with the Partition Treaties that were signed by Louis XIV, William III and the United Provinces in 1698 and 1700. By consulting Spanish sources to complete the understanding of the diplomatic process, this study analyses the political action that Spain mobilized in its defence around 1700 and describes the evolution of Spain's foreign policy as the product of the mistrust that had developed between the main powers of Europe. This mistrust was politically answered by Madrid with Carlos II's last will and other planned measures to ensure the viability of the project that contained a turning point in the policy underlying the alliances of the monarchy. Although, like that of the other powers, Spain's manoeuvrability was restricted, this study concludes that Spain was able to create policy action plans and rationally implement them; moreover, the dynamics resulting from the negotiation and signing of the Partition Treaties led the monarchy to oppose them at all costs and naturally led to the choice of a French heir as its only solution.     

A neglected chapter in Italy's transition from Fascism to the Republic: The Kingdom of the South (1943–1944)

Gallerano's paper examines the reasons why Italian historians have paid little attention to the political events that followed the liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno and the brief life of the government established under the auspices of the monarchy during the period of what was termed the Kingdom of the South. He argues that this neglect derives in part from the brevity of the period of civil government in the south, but mainly from the fact that historians have been attracted above all by the history of the Resistance which has led them to consider events in the south to be of secondary importance. Gallerano argues that such a view is quite unjustified and shows how some historians ‐ from Chabod in the early 1950s ‐ have understood that events in the south bore very directly on the broader transition from Fascism to the Republic. Challenging Renzo De Felice's recent claims that Italy's defeat on 8 September 1943 marked the beginning of a crisis of national identity, Gallerano argues that the circumstances that obtained in the months that followed made the south an exceptionally rich terrain for exploring the very contradictory feelings and expectations that were aroused in Italy by the experience of military defeat and political reconstruction.     

The decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy

One of the classical questions in the study of nationalism concerns the end of empires. Is nationalism, to use the phrase of Hiers and Wimmer, the cause or consequence of the end of empire? This paper considers a neglected case, that of the decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy in the years between 1848 and 1864. We find that nationalist conflicts indisputably caused the end of this political entity. Crucially, Danish nationalists in the imperial core preferred to downsize the territories controlled by the Oldenburgs rather than to share power with German speakers in the periphery. Decomposition was not, however, inevitable: an early introduction of power‐sharing schemes might have saved the imperial monarchy.     

Economic policy and development in Austrian Lombardy, 1815-1859

The question of economic integration is not new in Europe. Historically, the birth and construction of nation-states was important in stimulating interest in the systematic relationships between political and economic integration. In the case of the multinational structure of the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century, the result was an economic policy that, for political reasons, aimed to unite the material interests of a state that was completely heterogeneous in other respects. Lombardy was a case in point. Traditionally the region had been in the economic vanguard in central Europe. When it again became part of Austria in 1815 it also became subject to the imperial policy of political integration. As a result its economic priorities were partially reformulated. On the one hand, Austria had a protectionist system aimed at autarky which made incentives to industrial production a priority. Lombardy's purely mercantilist outlook, on the other hand, was based around the production of a few highly specialized goods, most notably silk, for export. Conflict between economic interests in Lombardy was the inevitable result. Nevertheless, the imperial government had to take account of the fact that it was impossible to restrict Lombardy's international trade relations exclusively to the Austrian market. And the problems that beset any effort to tie the Lombard economy into a denser network of relationships with the Austrian market were not due to the political formation of the Italian nation because Northern Italy, and Lombardy in particular, continued to occupy an anomalous position within the context of the Italian economy.     

Lord Salisbury,Mr. Chamberlain and South Africa, 1895–9

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the idea of Greater Britain, of the unity of the Anglo-Saxon colonies and the ‘mother country’, became a topic of considerable interest and controversy amongst the metropolitan intellectual and political elite. This article examines the roles played by the monarchy in the debates. Queen Victoria, as both idea and institution, assumed two central functions. First, it was argued that the institution of the monarchy, stretching back over centuries, could supply an anchor of permanence and constitutional fidelity in a redesigned global polity. This would reassure critics of such schemes that their fears about fundamental transformation were unfounded; that a thread of historical continuity ran through the proposals. Secondly, Victoria – or at least an idealised representation of her – acted as the linchpin for a sense of global national identity. The prestige and admiration that she (and the institution of the monarchy itself) generated, it was contended, bound the distant peoples of her realm in close communion. Moreover, the way in which she was sometimes represented in imperial debate harked back to (while modifying) an older civic humanist language of ‘patriot kingship’.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

'The purity of the blood': Poncet de la Grave,pronatalism and empire

This article will analyze key publications of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803), formerly the monarchy’s representative to the Admiralty Court, who worked during the Ancien Régime to restrict immigration to France, particularly that of people of color. He was also a passionate advocate for French imperial expansion. After the Revolution, in his political tract Réflections on the Unmarried, he expressed his anxiety over a declining French birthrate and a desire to have the state monitor marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in order to increase legitimate births. In this work he identified threats to what he referred to as ‘the purity of the blood’ within and without France, and proposed to the Republic legislation designed to eliminate them. Poncet de la Grave’s career has been largely neglected but his former position merits a closer look at his political writing, which expressed significant, constant objectives that demonstrate thematic continuity over a tumultuous time. French fears of depopulation and national ‘degeneration’ were still strong at the turn of the century, and remain of great interest to historians eager to understand how they were discussed in the context of great historical change.     

Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu dictionaries—one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a Presbyterian missionary some ten years later—this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth-century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not "mistakes"; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin, mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship contended, but were profoundly shaped bycontemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

“Neptune to the Common-wealth of England” (1652): the “Republican Britannia” and the continuity of interests

ABSTRACT

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant.     

War and the emergence of the English parliament, 1297–1360

Although the opening of the Hundred Years' War led the kings of France and England to make similar demands upon their subjects, the effect on the monarchy and on the Estates was markedly different in the two countries. In England taxation gave parliament a central role in the medieval polity while in France it strengthened first local autonomy and then absolute monarchy. Because parliament had an inescapable obligation to grant taxation for common defence, the Commons sought to limit this to periods of open war, and to criticise and control the handling and expenditure of the tax. The character of taxation, as levied by common assent and for the common profit, likewise permitted resistance to the extension of prerogative rights and the assertion of parliament's right to grant the tax on wool. In these matters the Commons were forced into a defensive dialogue with the Crown over their obligations which educated them in political argument and the techniques of parliamentary opposition. The power to levy taxation on grounds of ‘necessity of state’ strengthened both monarchies; but in England this was subject to the assent and authority of parliament which thereby emerged as a political institution concerned with the common needs of the realm.     

Elite migrations in modern Italy: patterns of settlement,integration and identity negotiation

Abstract

Francesco Crispi has often appeared a paradoxical figure. In the earlier part of his life he was a revolutionary republican and a friend of Mazzini. After 1860 he accepted the monarchy, but remained very much a man of the Left and in many ways a quintessential democrat. Yet he ended his career as an authoritarian Prime Minister, a vigorous opponent of the Far Left, and an imperialist, who prorogued parliament and contemplated dispensing with representative government altogether. This article contends that Crispi's career has more coherence than is commonly suggested; it focuses on an important but hitherto neglected aspect of his thinking, namely the problem of how to achieve a sense of national consciousness in Italy through ‘political education’. The article traces the development of the idea of national political education throughout Crispi's career and argues that his two terms as Prime Minister in 1887–91 and 1893–6 can only be fully understood in the context of his long‐standing concern with this problem.     

Die historia francorum senonensis und der Aufstieg des Hauses Capet

In this inquiry the author confronts the historiographical view of the rise of the Capetians to power, as represented by the Historia Francorum Senonensis, with historical reality. He comes to the conclusion that the medieval historian, writing in the thirties of the eleventh century, sought by the selection, combination, interpretation, and presentation of his passages to propagate a view which had originated at the archbishop's court at Sens. The actual political motive was the dispute of Sens with Reins over coronation rights; it was this that explains the anti-Capetian tendency of the author's account of the dynastic change in 987. Moreover, it is possible to discern a political consciousness which was able to consider the West-Frankish/French monarchy as independent from dynastic considerations. We are thus dealing not with a historiographical statement of the Carolingian point of view, but with the reaction to a particular situation in ecclesiastical politics combined with a non-personal theory of the state.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

John Francis Davis as governor and diplomat on the China Coast (1844–1848)

This paper explores the role of the nineteenth-century sinologist-cum-diplomat, John Francis Davis, in Sino-British relations after the ratification of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1843. It examines his time as governor of Hong Kong and as Britain's effective minister to China from 1844 until 1848, in which he attempted to have the city of Canton opened to foreign trade. Arguing that Davis's view of Sino-British relations was as cultural in character as it was political, this paper suggests that Davis fundamentally sought to establish strict equality between the two empires. He attempted to use his knowledge of Chinese civilization to build an equal international relationship between two sovereign nations rather than an imperial relationship between a conqueror and the conquered people. While this conviction laid the groundwork for Hong Kong to become a bilingual Anglo-Chinese colony, it fractured diplomacy with Qing officials. Davis's insistence on political equality would amount to an aggressive imposition of European diplomatic norms on his dealings with the Qing representative Qiying. More precisely, the paper explains how the policies of this archetypal British ‘China Hand’ bifurcated in the directions of both progressive cultural policy but also gunboat diplomacy.     

The Evolution of the Political Atmosphere in Provincial Society during the First World War

Since the end of the Soviet Union, scholars have conducted far more complex and multifaceted explorations of Russian imperial political parties and their ability to influence public opinion. The changing circumstances that war and revolution wrought on popular support for the monarchy are particularly evident in the Urals region.     

The king,the church and the Jews: some considerations on the expulsions from England and France

Contemporary sources shorn a clear awareness of the political and economic motives behind the expulsion of Jews in 1290 and 1306, an awareness which actually prevented any wide approval for the anti-Jewish policy of the kings. Furthermore, from the point of view of the clergy at least, the expulsion of Jews appeared as another stage in the centralizing policy of monarchs, one which lowered the clergy's own status and restricted its freedom of action. Thus, the lack of support for the expulsion of Jews in the late middle ages hints at a new awareness of the ways in which the monarchy manipulated the Jews for its own political and f nancial ends.     

The king,the church and the Jews: some considerations on the expulsions from England and France

Contemporary sources shorn a clear awareness of the political and economic motives behind the expulsion of Jews in 1290 and 1306, an awareness which actually prevented any wide approval for the anti-Jewish policy of the kings. Furthermore, from the point of view of the clergy at least, the expulsion of Jews appeared as another stage in the centralizing policy of monarchs, one which lowered the clergy's own status and restricted its freedom of action. Thus, the lack of support for the expulsion of Jews in the late middle ages hints at a new awareness of the ways in which the monarchy manipulated the Jews for its own political and f nancial ends.     

Modernising colonialism: The British Labour movement and Africa

The article evaluates the widely held view that the Attlee governments lacked a distinctive approach to colonial affairs by examining the Labour movement's post-war, institution building activities in Kenya. In Labour's colonial policy deliberations, Kenya was the focus of particular attention and is used as a case study to shed light on the Labour leadership's wider imperial concerns and objectives. From the 1920s, the Labour party advocated that the colonies be encouraged to develop trade unions, co-operatives and local government. Some tentative moves in this direction were made in 1930 by Ramsay MacDonald's administration but it was not until Labour came to power in 1945 that, in response to international pressure and the nationalist challenge, significant steps were taken to promote institutions which would organise the African masses. The argument advanced is that Labour leaders drew on their movement's historical traditions to encourage forms of African economic and political activism which were likely to stabilise colonial rule.